Wolves of Wall Street: How a Network of Frat Boys Tilts the Field Against Women

Martin Scorcese’s new film, The Wolf of Wall Street, depicts a culture of hyper-masculinity and emotional immaturity, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort, parties hard and cuts shady deals in a drug-induced haze.

A report by Max Abelson and Zeke Faux published this week by Bloomberg reveals that a different kind of male culture is dominant in the real world of high flying Wall Street executives. Abelson and Faux report that a network of fraternity brothers exists that effectively tilts the playing field against women, among others.

They write:

Conor Hails, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sigma Chi chapter, was in a Philadelphia hotel ballroom last month for a Barclays Plc (BARC) recruiting reception. A friend pointed out a banker from their fraternity. Hails, 20, approached with a secret handshake.

As students vie for 2014 internships in an industry where 22-year-olds can make more than $100,000 a year, interviews with three dozen fraternity members showed a network whose Wall Street alumni guide resumes to the tops of stacks, reveal interview questions with recommended answers, offer applicants secret mottoes and support chapters facing crackdowns.

That’s one reason men continue to dominate on Wall Street, where no woman has run a big bank. General Motors Co. (GM) announced Dec. 10 it would make Mary Barra the auto industry’s first female chief executive officer, the same day research firm Catalyst Inc. showed women holding about one in eight executive roles in U.S. finance.

Penn’s Alpha Epsilon Pi, which gave up its charter in 2012 to escape sanctions for hazing, got a member into Morgan Stanley for the fourth year in a row. Dartmouth College’s Alpha Delta, an inspiration for the 1978 comedy “Animal House,” sent someone to the New York-based firm from the fifth consecutive class days after a New Hampshire court reprimanded the chapter for providing alcohol to someone underage, filings show.

‘Male Dominated’

Fraternities retain influence in the face of scrutiny by parents, politicians and police for binge drinking, hazing and at least 60 deaths in the U.S. since 2005. A freshman at Baruch College in New York died this month after suffering a blow to the head during a Pi Delta Psi hazing ritual, according to Monroe County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney David Christine.

The largest U.S. banks say they are meritocracies and run diversity programs to shift an industry that once only let women onto the New York Stock Exchange floor as clerks during wartime shortages. Goldman Sachs added 10 women last year to a partnership that had one when CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein was elected to it in 1988.

“There obviously has been much progress since 20 years ago,” said Siegfried von Bonin, head of Dartmouth’s Alpha Delta chapter. “But the reality is that it’s still very much a male-dominated culture.”

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Ahh, the airy belief of the control of higher Mathematics in Economy simply allows some scammers in fine tweeds in utmost genius ways to scam and ponzi scheme a whole Planet, while all the scam is disguised well as economic growth and greatness for all, while Corporately mass surveilling everyone and everything like pseudo-mathemati ideologic control freaks without the slightest clue of basic “Arithmetics”..